Poor Stephen Rue. Having been handed the equivalent of a shit sandwich by his illustrious predecessor Bill Morrow, all that the new chief executive of NBN Co can is to pony up when the company's quarterly results are due and go through the motions.

The NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia's national broadband network, has made no progress on raising the average revenue per user, which remains stuck on $44, the same as that recorded for full-year 2018, even though other metrics have shown an increase.